Google Hangouts: international collaborative working.
I have had a very busy few weeks. Monday saw the launch of my new company, FireCask, a digital marketing agency that specialises in WordPress and Creative Content amongst other things. The company was formed through many hours of videoconferencing, most of it being done through Google+ Hangouts (you can read more about our launch here). Forming a company with 4 directors, 2 of which reside in the UK and the other 2 in Israel is a hard task but this made the process a lot smoother. We chose Google+ as our choice of videoconferencing. In this post I will write about the features we used that can also help you with your business. Starting a Google+ Hangout That’s easy enough – simply go to https://plus.google.com/hangouts and click on “start hangout”: This will open a new window. You can choose from quite a few options. The top option lets you choose people you want to hang out with. You can make it public for all to join (limited to 10 people at a time) or just invite fellow colleagues into a private hangout: There is also another cool feature here – enabling hangouts on air. This option lets your hangout become a live feed within your YouTube channel (you will need to authorise the connection to your YouTube account). This feature is great if you want to, for example, have you and 2 other people broadcast a live videocast for everyone to see without the need for a Google+ account or the need to join the hangout itself. With this, unlimited people can tune in! The Hangout Window Once you’ve set up your hangout you will be welcomed with this screen as you wait for others to join: Once someone has joined you will see the other person appear in the main window, as well as all the other people who join in. Say hello to Anna! Once more people join the hangout they will appear alongside the bottom. Whoever is speaking (or outputting the most noise) will appear in the main area, swapping as people speak so that you don’t have to worry about finding which person is speaking. This can be changed by simply clicking one of the invitee thumbnails. You can also mute yourself by audio or video should you need to. Screensharing Screensharing can be enabled by clicking the button within the top navigation menu of the hangout itself. You can select the specific window you want to share from a list. Once you do this your webcam will turn off and be replaced by the window you selected. Here Anna has shared the 123 Blog on her screen: This feature was fantastic when we shared web design concepts, presentations and reports and other things that were inconvenient to share between a few people in real time. Google Docs This was amazing for us. Once we were really getting serious and working on how 2 companies would merge we needed to be able to, between the 4 of us, separately edit one spreadsheet without overlap or losing any data. This would have been an extremely hard task if done through any other means. Google Docs (which is currently turning into a product called “Google Drive”) has been around for a while but with the Google Docs functionality within the hangout itself (also in the top navigation menu) it made life a lot easier. You can select a number of documents from within your Google Docs account which will appear in the left sidebar. Once the documents were open it was output into the main window and all 4 of us could edit the document as we saw fit whilst all being able to chat to each other at the same time: Here you will notice on the left (next to row 2) that there are 2 documents in the list and the spreadsheet is open with a text document underneath. All 4 of us edited the 2 documents in real time as we chatted to each other about what we were doing. This simplified so many things for us so that collaborative working such as this became a doddle, and we didn’t have to send each other annoying revisions of the same document. One last thing – Google Effects If you’ve been in the hangout for an hour or two you may want to make it a little more humourous. In this case, click the Google Effects button in the top navigation menu. This feature is a fun addition to hangouts. You can choose from a selection of different headgear, glass and facial hair. Once you add them they stick to your face! For me this is fantastic technology as the effects follow you as you move around. Here I am wearing some geeky specs and a Google headband while Anna tries on some devil horns for size: Google hangouts have many options, and there are more you can use within Google Apps. Why not start a hangout now!
Does Google PLUS really add to our world?
It looks like Facebook. It’s blurb sounds like Facebook. If you got up close, it probably even smell’s like Facebook, but this is Google entering the social networking arena…again. A select band of people (were you one?) were this week invited into Google’s latest project – a social networking service called Google PLUS. Those selected few will also soon be able to invite others and the idea is to let people share and discuss status updates, photos and links as you would in Facebook but in a more intimate group. Small groups or ‘Circles’ is the focus – colleagues, best mates, sportsteam teammates etc – and for that purpose there are group text messaging and video chat facilities built into the network. The Google line is it is more like real life, you have more control and more privacy: “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product management at Google. Pitched by anybody else and actually it probably sounds like a poor-imitation of what is already out there. Yet this is Google saying this and backing the project so people will sit up and take notice. The biggest issue is whether the heavily scientific and engineered approach that has seen Google become so successful using algorithms and data analysis, can be converted to a more touchy-feely and informal approach that social networking thrives on. What Google hopes is that people will sign up with PLUS to enable them to get at least some insight into the valuable world that is developing in social networks in terms of advertising data and trends that so often is not accessible to Google’s search robots or experts. The ‘reality’ approach includes an attempt to mimic those occasions when people want to be your friend when you don’t really care. Unlike on Facebook, people do not have to agree to be friends with one another. Via your circles however you can have greater control over who sees what about you. So you effectively get more than one persona. The multiple personality aspect is promoted as a benefit and can offer greater control, but could also offer its own difficulties and dangers of course. The potential winner as we see it at the moment is ‘Sparks’ which is a push type notification of “what you’re into and … stuff it thinks you’ll like”. It may sound a bit Big Brotheresque but the viral aspect and shared interests appeal of Twitter and Facebook could be amplified by this tool. Google has of course launched big ideas before and then slowly retreated but expect it to push and bang the drum on this one more and more as the year progresses and they tweak based on feedback from a growing user base. Have you had an invite to Google PLUS? Have you taken the plunge? What are your thoughts?